As part of its contract with the US’ Department of Energy, IBM has announced that it’s teaming up with NVIDIA to launch a pair of Centers of Excellence for supercomputing. These will be located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – home of the TITAN supercomputer – and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The resulting supercomputers are expected to be installed in 2017 and will be operational the following year.
In the time leading up to the pair of supercomputers – called Summit and Sierra – being operational, the Centers of Excellence will figure out how to best take advantage of them. Fields that these supercomputers will focus on include energy, climate research, cosmology, biophysics, astrophysics, medicine, and national security-related interests.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Future Home of the Summit Supercomputer
Taking advantage of IBM’s OpenPOWER platform (in effect, “open” Power processors), each of these new supercomputers will have a lot of manpower behind them to make sure that their jobs are being done as efficiently as possible. Computational scientists from both IBM and NVIDIA will work in tandem with applications scientists to both develop effective tools and optimize code. A nice side-effect of this would be the discovery of better ways to develop and execute, involving programming models, algorithms, and so forth.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Future Home of the Sierra Supercomputer
Says Dave Turk, IBM’s VP of HPC Market Engagement, “It is about more than just delivering our new data-centric OpenPOWER-based hardware systems. Along with NVIDIA, our scientists are ensuring Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore are able to get the most out of these revolutionary supercomputers to reach the next level of scientific discovery. In addition, our expectation is that many of the codes that are worked on will find benefit in other sectors of the U.S. economy.”
There’s no word on what the end configurations of these supercomputers will look like, but given the timing, it seems there’s a great chance that they will feature NVIDIA’s Pascal-based (confirmed to be Volta) GPUs. Given the promises touted with those, these supercomputers should offer some truly incredible performance.